Automated plant control systems include a comprehensive set of algorithms, or software-definable process control routines, to control and monitor various processes within, for instance, a manufacturing facility. The control systems can be tailored to satisfy a wide range of process requirements globally or within specified portions of the facility. Conventionally, the control systems include a variety of modules, each having its own processor or firmware, linked together by communication buses to result in a distributed process control system. The distributed nature of the system affords high performance with the capability to expand the system incrementally to satisfy growth or modifications in the facility.
In order to allow a user to tailor a process control system to a particular processing environment, it is important to provide such systems with highly-configurable and adaptable systems. Process control systems generally provide a means by which users can create custom control strategies, e.g., software-definable process control routines. In object-oriented programming environments, a complete control strategy may be built from smaller components, such as "blocks" and "parameters." A block is a software construct, or "object," used to encapsulate the data and the algorithms of elemental control computations; parameters define the interface to individual pieces of data within a block. Although conventional object-oriented process control systems do provide a user with some means of tailoring a system to their particular needs, conventional process control systems are still evolving toward systems that are high-configurable and flexible to meet the specific requirements of a broad range of processing environments.
Therefore, what is needed in the art are more powerful and flexible architectural features for distributed real-time process control systems.